Working Papers in Ethics and Moral Psychology is a speaker series conducted under the auspices of the Icahn School of Medicine Bioethics Program. It is a working group where speakers are invited to present well-developed, as yet unpublished work. The focus of the group is interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on topics in ethics, bioethics, neuroethics, and moral psychology. The meetings begin with a brief presentation by the invited speaker and the remaining time is devoted to a discussion of the paper. The speakers will make their papers available in advance of their presentation to those who sign up for the Working Papers mailing list.
Upcoming Speakers:
11 Oct: Jordan Mackenzie, NYU
8 Nov: Susana Nuccetelli, St. Cloud State
13 Dec: Michael Brownstein, John Jay
14 Mar: Kyle Ferguson, CUNY
18 Apr: Jeff Sebo, NYU
23 May: Johann Frick, Princeton
Various programmes and results in the philosophy/foundations of spacetime theories illustrate themes from reductionism and functionalism in general philosophy of science. I will focus on some programmes and results about how the physics of matter contributes to determining, or even determines, or even explains, chrono-geometry. I hope to say something about most of the following examples: in the philosophical literature, Robb (1914), and Mundy (1983); and in the physics literature: Barbour and Bertotti (1982); Hojman, Kuchar and Teitelboim (1976); Dull, Schuller et al. (2012, 2018); and Gomes & Shyam (2016).
Presented by Metro Area Philosophers of Science
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Armin Schulz (University of Kansas)
Details: 4:30-6:30pm Wednesday Oct 9; 3rd floor seminar room, 5 Washington Place (NYU).
Title: TBD.
Abstract: TBD.
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Christopher Weaver (University of Illinois)
Details: 4:30-6:30pm Wednesday Nov 13; 3rd floor seminar room, 5 Washington Place (NYU).
Title: TBD.
Abstract: TBD.
Scholars working under the broad umbrella of New Materialism have offered compelling reappraisals of the ways in which we know, interact with, and exist in the world. This scholarship also intersects with recent work on music and sound, which raises rich sets of questions regarding human agency, material, ethics, aesthetics, embodiment, and the subject/object dichotomy, among other issues.
We invite scholars working in the humanities, arts and sciences to submit proposals for papers and performances that engage with the themes of sound and new materialism, broadly construed. We welcome work that adopts historical, technological, analytical, philosophical, materialist, and creative vantage points, among others. Overall, this conference will direct these diverse disciplinary and methodological perspectives towards convergent and critical issues, creating new, interdisciplinary lines of enquiry and generating original research.
The one-day conference will consist of panels that comprise of papers with short reflections by a moderator, as well as an evening concert that includes opportunities for discussion. The concluding concert of work that engages with these themes from creative perspectives will afford attendees with an opportunity to consider and discuss issues concerning sound, material, and agency in a forum that contrasts with, but also complements, our events during the day. Conference participants are strongly encouraged to attend both the daytime and evening portions of the conference.
Proposals are called for:
Paper presentations of 20 minutes with 10 minutes of Q&A.
Artistic presentation of 20 minutes with 10 minutes of discussion
Submission: Proposals of no more than 500 words (300 words for artistic presentation) should be submitted as a PDF by August 14th 2019 to jc5036@columbia.edu
and include “NMAS Submission” in the subject line. If you’re applying for an artistic presentation please include three representative 2 minute audio/video examples. Please also include the title of your proposed paper and anonymize your submission. Include your name, affiliation, and contact information in the body of the email, and also nominate any audio/visual requirements for your paper or performance.
I will argue, pace a great many of my contemporaries, that there’s something right about Boltzmann’s attempt to ground the 2nd law of thermodynamics in deterministic time-reversal invariant classical dynamics, and that in order to appreciate what’s right about (what was at least at one time) Boltzmann’s explanatory project one has to fully apprehend the nature of (a) microphysical causal structure, (b) time-reversal invariance, and (c) the relationship between Boltzmann entropy and the work of Rudolf Clausius.
There will be dinner after the talk. If you are interested, please send an email with “Dinner” in the heading to nyphilsci@gmail.com (please note that all are welcome, but only the speaker’s dinner will be covered.) If you have any other questions, please email denise.dykstra@rutgers.edu.
David Albert’s work has been of seminal importance to the foundations of physics, exerting central influence on the direction the field and laying foundations for much of its ongoing development. In celebration of David’s many past and continuing contributions, we will be hosting a conference at Columbia University on the foundations of physics. We expect talks on a range of topics, including the foundations of quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, the possible emergence of space and time, the metaphysics of science, and the nature of agency.
Confirmed Speakers
Jeff Barrett (UC Irvine)
Gordon Belot (Michigan)
Craig Callender (UC San Diego)
Sean Carroll (Caltech)
Eddy Chen (UC San Diego)
Sidney Felder (Rutgers)
Alison Fernandes (Dublin)
Shelly Goldstein (Rutgers)
Ned Hall (Harvard)
Barry Loewer (Rutgers)
Tim Maudlin (NYU)
Michael Miller (Toronto)
Alyssa Ney (UC Davis)
Lev Vaidman (Tel Aviv)
David Wallace (Pittsburgh)
Nino Zanghi (Genoa)
Organizing Committee
Alison Fernandes (alison.fernandes@tcd.ie)
Michael Miller (mike.miller@utoronto.ca)
Porter Williams (porterwi@usc.edu)
.
The conference is open to the public. Please direct any questions to Porter Williams (porterwi@usc.edu).
Friday, November 15
8:45 am: Breakfast
9:30 am: Jeff Barrett (UC Irvine): Quantum Randomness and Empirical Underdetermination
10:15 am: Shelly Goldstein (Rutgers): Typicality, Humean Probability, and the Mentaculus
11:00: Coffee Break
11:20 am: Craig Callender (UC San Diego): No Time for Time from No-Time
12:05 pm: Alyssa Ney (UC Davis): WFR or QFT?
12:50: Lunch
2:20 pm: Gordon Belot (Michigan): The Mach-Einstein Principle of 1917-1918
3:05 pm: Sean Carroll (Caltech): The Mentaculus as a Causal Network
3:50: Coffee Break
4:10 pm: David Wallace (Pittsburgh): TBA
4:55 pm: Ned Hall (Harvard): Respectful Deflationism
5:45 pm: Adjourn
Saturday, November 16
8:45 am: Breakfast
9:30 am: Lev Vaidman (Tel Aviv): The many-worlds interpretation and the Born rule
10:15 am: Eddy Chen (UC San Diego): Nomic Vagueness
11:00: Coffee Break
11:20 am: Michael Miller (Toronto): Infrared Cancellation and Measurement
12:05 pm: Alison Fernandes (Trinity College Dublin): The Direction of Records
12:50: Lunch
2:20 pm: Sidney Felder (Rutgers): Gödel’s Rotating Solutions, Bilking, and Natural Laws
3:05 pm: Nino Zanghi (INFN Genova): TBA
3:50: Coffee Break
4:10 pm: Tim Maudlin (NYU): S = k ln(B(W)): Boltzmann entropy, the Second Law, and the Architecture of Hell
4:55 pm: Barry Loewer (Rutgers): The Consequence Argument Meets the Mentaculus
5:45 pm: Adjourn
Presented by Metro Area Philosophers of Science
Spring 2020 Schedule:
Anthony Aguirre (UCSC) – “Entropy in long-lived genuinely closed quantum systems”
6:30-8:30pm Tuesday Feb 4; NYU Philosophy Department (5 Washington Place), 3rd floor seminar room.
David Papineau (King’s College London & CUNY) – “The Nature of Representation”
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday March 3; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.
Jim Holt (Author of Why Does the World Exist?) – “Here, Now, Photon: Why Newton was closer to EM than Maudlin is”
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday April 7; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.
Deborah Mayo (Virginia Tech)
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday April 28; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.
The NYU Center for Bioethics is pleased to welcome submissions of abstracts for its 1st Annual Philosophical Bioethics Workshop, to be held at NYU on Friday, April 3, 2020.
We are seeking to showcase new work in philosophical bioethics, including (but not limited to) neuroethics, environmental ethics, animal ethics, reproductive ethics, research ethics, ethics of AI, data ethics, and clinical ethics.
Our distinguished keynote speaker will be Frances Kamm.
There will be four additional slots for papers chosen from among the submitted abstracts, including one slot set aside for a graduate student speaker. The most promising graduate student submission will be awarded a Graduate Prize, which includes coverage of travel expenses (up to $500, plus accommodation for two nights) as well as an award of $500. Please indicate in your submission email whether you would like to be considered for the Graduate Prize.
Please submit extended abstracts of between 750 and 1,000 words to philosophicalbioethics@gmail.com by 11:59 pm EST on Friday, January 24, 2020. Abstracts should be formatted for blind review and should be suitable for presentation in 30-35 minutes. Notification of acceptance will take place via email by Friday, February 14, 2020.
When submitting your abstract, please also indicate whether you would be interested in serving as a commentator in the event that your abstract is not selected for presentation. We will be inviting four additional participants to serve as commentators.
Presented by Metro Area Philosophers of Science
Spring 2020 Schedule:
Anthony Aguirre (UCSC) – “Entropy in long-lived genuinely closed quantum systems”
6:30-8:30pm Tuesday Feb 4; NYU Philosophy Department (5 Washington Place), 3rd floor seminar room.
David Papineau (King’s College London & CUNY) – “The Nature of Representation”
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday March 3; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.
Jim Holt (Author of Why Does the World Exist?) – “Here, Now, Photon: Why Newton was closer to EM than Maudlin is”
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday April 7; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.
Deborah Mayo (Virginia Tech)
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday April 28; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.
Free Will
Implications from Physics and Metaphysics
The workshop will be hybrid, and anyone interested can participate through Zoom, although there will be limited spots for in-person participants. If you are interested in attending in-person, please reply to this email or write to loewer@philosophy.rutgers.edu.
Barry Loewer (loewer@philosophy.rutgers.edu) Assistant: Diego Arana (diego.arana@rutgers.edu)
Program (All times are EST)
Zoom Link: https://tinyurl.com/freewillzoom
iCal: https://tinyurl.com/freewillical
May 11
10:00am Peter van Inwagen (Notre Dame, Duke)
Ginet’s Principle: Our freedom is the freedom to add to the
given past.
11:30am John Perry (Stanford)
Causation, Entailment and Freedom
3:00pm Barry Loewer (Rutgers)
The Consequence Argument Meets the Mentaculus
4:30pm Carlo Rovelli (Aix-Marseille, UWO)
Free will: Back to Reichenbach
May 12
10:00am Kadri Vihvelin (USC)
Why We can’t Change the Past
11:30am Valia Allori (NIU)
Freedom from the Quantum?
3:00pm Tim O’Connor (Indiana, Baylor)
Top-Down and Indeterministic Agency: Why?
4:30pm Jessica Wilson (Toronto)
Two Routes to the Emergence of Free Will
Jacob Soll, in conversation with Pierre Force, John Shovlin, Carl Wennerlind, and Emmanuelle Saada
After two government bailouts of the U.S. economy in less than twenty years, free market ideology is due for serious reappraisal. In Free Market: the History of an Idea, Jacob Soll details how we got to this current crisis, and how we can find our way out by looking to earlier iterations of free market thought. Contrary to popular narratives, early market theorists believed that states had an important role in building and maintaining free markets. But in the eighteenth century, thinkers insisted on free markets without state intervention, leading to a tradition of ideological brittleness. That tradition only calcified in the centuries that followed. Tracing the intellectual evolution of the free market from Cicero to Milton Friedman, Soll argues that we need to go back to the origins of free market ideology in order to truly understand it—and to develop new economic concepts to face today’s challenges.
Jacob Soll is professor of history and accounting at the University of Southern California. He has been awarded numerous prestigious prizes including two NEH Fellowships, the Jacques Barzun Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, in 2011, the MacArthur Fellowship. He also advises political and financial leaders across the globe to promote accounting standards and financial transparency.
Joining Jacob Soll to discuss his book will be: Pierre Force, Professor of French and History at Columbia; John Shovlin, Professor of History at NYU; and Carl Wennerlind, Professor of History at Barnard College. Emmanuelle Saada, Professor of History and French at Columbia, will moderate the discussion.
This event is co-sponsored by the Maison Française and the Department of History.